SheevaPlug, tiny linux server

This little wall plug is actually a full computer with 1.2GHz cpu, with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of of flash memory. It comes with versions of linux, ported for its ARM processor. At $50, this cool system could be finding itself in a lot of homes. You can get more information from the manufacturer. What uses can you think of for it?

i would love to add a usb-based input device to turn it into a home automation remote. control the stereo from another room, turn lights on/off, etc. the problem is there’s no display so the buttons would have to be very specific… anybody got a good usb device with lots of buttons in a decent looking case and a howto? =)

Rouge Server! Man, you could do all sorts of things with that bad boy. It’s discreet enough that if you plugged it in and connected the ethernet to it, only a technician would even think to stop and ponder it’s purpose.

Also, this could be used for a number of not-so-good things. It would be simple enough to program it to work with a usb-based wireless card, have it sniff open wireless connections in a place like Starbucks, and easily grab passwords and other important data. Tech this small and easy starts getting very dangerous very quickly.

I was thinking about using to do the job of a mobile authentication/directory server. Load it up with LDAP, samba for winbind, dhcpd, maybe radius for some 802.1x auth, and hell, even asterisk and you could setup a portable intranet by literally just plugging this and a wifi router into a power outlet. Great for everything from lan parties to disaster recovery.

hmm, you could;
make a simple script that emails you the current [external] ip, setup openvpn on it, then connect it somewhere [at work / school], and presto! free [or $99 if you don’t plan to later retrieve the server] vpn service. :]

At first I said “Cool!” but I realized that there isn’t really anything I would do with it that I don’t already do my NSLU2, which is not much.
* a NAS?
* plug a USB 1-wire adapter into it and make a Zone heating control system for my house (something I’ve thought about doing with my slug)

I like that it is supper low power. When I stopped using my slug as a Nas, I noticed the drop in my electrical bill, but that was probably the cheap usb enclosure I was using.

At $100 for the dev kit, it’s not really competitive with a Slug which can usually be found for under $100 these days.

As a developer with a lot of home projects, I like the idea of a carry it with me SVN server. Crossover cat5 and my laptop and I’d have my full dev environment wherever i went! I’d prolly need more than 512Mb, but 2Gb oughta be plenty.

Easy now, he was probably referring to the Flash storage, not the RAM of the device.
I added an http://evercu.be to mine, made it a lot more versatile, and very close to synology’s NAS solutions. except for room for 5 hdd’s for the price of a single disc one.

Admitantly I love the idea, not sure how practical it is in the end tho, it’s nice if maybe you want a limited webserver just for the sake, maybe a small media server if you like… but now days you really want more than that.

the IP cam idea isn’t bad but is it really cost effective, and how many cheap cams can you get running under linux?

The only thing I think would be neat is maybe just adding a USB bluetooth module and running it as some kind of advertising tool or just a simple bluetooth AP, again not all that useful tho.

because this has such a tiny power footprint, you could easily setup a webserver for yourself on your home cable connection and use dyndns or similar. at only 5W you are looking at under $.50 per month at peak usage.

this would also be interesting to setup with openvpn or hamachi as a network intrusion device.

I’m thinking (once the price drops) buy 10-20 of these, some power strips, and a couple of switches, and bam: instant render farm/beowulf cluster. Of course, at $99 apiece, it still isn’t bad (considering how versatile it is.)

I wonder if there would be any way to rig a monitor up to this thing and use it as a low-end home pc.

Now if only it had a power socket on the front for piggy-backing (and not taking up an entire socket) and an in-built solid-state relay controlled by the CPU so you can switch the other device on or off via software.

This thing has better specs than the box that I’m currently using as a server, with the exception of the storage. However, that could be fixed with a $25 dollar 16 GB SDHC card.
What would be really interesting is if a several people each bought one and then used the group as a distributed server. They would share storage, bandwidth, and computational capacity. It seems like that would be a really scalable idea. If the security issues could be worked out, people all over the world could make some sort of crazy huge network of them that would work like Amazon EC3. I wish I could pull that off.